Advanced DSO technology available to VxWorks users

GREEN Hills Software Inc . has announced that its industry-leading MULTI device software optimisation solution will again be available to VxWorks users.

This is a result of Wind River Systems' agreement to fulfill the 99-year commitment it made in 1992 and 1993 to provide the VxWorks operating system to Green Hills Software. The settlement with Wind River resolves all outstanding litigation between the companies.

Green Hills Software's industry-leading performance is demonstrated by the fact that, in 2004, microprocessor vendors including Analog Devices, Freescale, IBM and NEC-selected Green Hills compilers more than three times as often as all other compilers combined in order to achieve the highest possible performance on benchmarks that were certified and published by the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC).

Since EEMBC began certifying benchmark results in 2000, microprocessor vendors selected Green Hills compilers nearly twice as often as the next three most popular compilers combined (GNU, Microsoft and Wind River).

Only Green Hills Software's TimeMachine Debugger and SuperTrace Probe, released in 2003, gives software developers an ‘instant replay’ capability, enabling them to debug by running and stepping forward and backward in time using a real-time recording of a device's behaviour. This allows customers to find even the most elusive, irreproducible bugs in just minutes and can shave months off the time required to debug software using other solutions.

With Integrity, Green Hills Software is the first and only independent software vendor that has designed, developed and certified a securely partitioned operating system to the USA’s Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) most stringent standard for flight-critical avionics systems.

Since 1996, Integrity has been the only commercial device operating system to support the Multiple Independent Levels of Security (MILS) architecture.

Integrity has been deployed in nuclear weapons systems for years and is now undergoing the most stringent security evaluation undertaken by any commercial operating system, to Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level 6+ (EAL6+). On the seven-level EAL scale, no operating system has previously been certified beyond EAL5.

While the competition depends on per-copy production royalties for their profits, Green Hills Software's Integrity and velOSity operating systems have always been royalty-free since their introduction in 1996, eliminating the per-copy license fees that manufacturers have traditionally been forced to pay for their device operating systems.

Integrity and velOSity also minimise memory and processor costs with higher performance and a smaller footprint, as low as 3KB of RAM.

Green Hills Software's device software optimisation solution enables organisations to significantly reduce the time, cost and risk of device software development by standardising their development methodology and environment across product lines and projects. This allows developer expertise, application code and software licences to be shared across an organisation.

Green Hills Software supports more device operating systems than any other DSO vendor. MULTI was the first device software optimisation environment to support Linux and VxWorks, as well as in-house operating systems.

In addition, MULTI is available for other popular operating systems, including Green Hills Software's Integrity and velocity, Express Logic's ThreadX, which is available from and supported by Green Hills Software, Enea's OSE, Windows and Solaris. Other DSO vendors support just a few device operating systems.

MULTI can be used from within any Eclipse implementation, whereas other DSO vendors require customers to use a custom version of Eclipse that must be licensed from them.

MULTI is integrated with about 100 different tools from Green Hills Software and its partners to support the entire device software lifecycle across an entire enterprise including design, development, simulation, integration with new hardware, debugging, testing, performance optimisation, resource optimisation and configuration management. Other DSO vendors work with just a few third-party tools and have very few of their own.

While other DSO vendors promote different, incompatible operating systems for use in different types of devices, Green Hills Software's Integrity operating system can scale from the smallest, most resource constrained devices up to large distributed systems with the highest reliability, security and safety requirements including security critical enterprise applications.

The use of a single operating system technology maximises the ability of organisations to re-use expertise and code across products and liberates manufacturers from the past quagmire of having to use different, incompatible operating systems to satisfy diverse device requirements.

Integrity is the first and only operating system to be certified under the ‘POSIX: Certified by IEEE and The Open Group’ program to the 1003.1-2003 System Interfaces Product Standard.

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